Reflections of the digital environment on family education – the need for parent empowerment

Abstract

Digital technologies have been an essential part of our daily lives, work, education, leisure, and family life for some time now. This is a natural environment for the new generations of children and young people who are born, grow up, and spend most of their time with technology, although this does not mean they use it appropriately. On the other hand, for parents who grew up in a different environment, this represents a source of numerous parental concerns, challenges, and uncertainties regarding their empowerment to mediate children’s interactions with technology and new responsibilities in terms of developing the digital literacy of their children. Contemporary literature refers to this phenomenon as digital parenting and defines it as parental efforts and engagement in regulating and supporting children's activities in the digital environment (parental mediation). According to the previously mentioned facts, we come to the question of parents’ empowerment to engage in mediation, i.e., regulating, guiding, and supporting the use of technology to promote the development of digital literacy in children. Based on the empowerment theory, this concept involves both the process and the result of the achieved level of empowerment and refers to the processes by which individuals, in this case, parents, gain power, authority, access to resources, and control in the context of adequate mediation in children’s interactions with technology. The research aims to examine parents’ perception of their empowerment to mediate their children's use of digital technologies. In this research we start from the parents' perception of the risks and opportunities of children using digital technologies. Then, we focus on the mediation strategies that parents use in regulating their children's interaction with digital technologies. Finally, we seek to investigate to what extent do parents feel empowered to mediate their children's use of digital technologies, and what kind of support do they need in this context. A descriptive research method is used to provide a detailed description of parents’ empowerment to engage in mediation. Data will be collected through a survey of elementary school children's parents from Belgrade, while the conclusions and pedagogical implications will be drawn based on their responses.